Restaurant Staff Schedule Template

Common restaurant shifts

Most restaurants build the day around service. Front of house works an opening or lunch shift and a dinner or closing shift. The kitchen starts earlier for prep and stays later to break down and clean.

Shift names vary from place to place. These are the ones you'll hear most:

• Opening shift: arrives before doors open, sets up, works lunch.
• Mid shift: starts late morning and covers the gap between lunch and dinner, so you are never short during the handover.
• Closing shift: works dinner, then closes the room or the line.
• Split shift: works lunch, takes a long unpaid break, comes back for dinner.
• Double: lunch and dinner back to back, with no long break.
• Clopen: closes at night and opens the next morning.

How to plan coverage around the lunch and dinner rush

Staff for the rush, not the daily average. Pull covers or orders per hour from your POS for the last four to six weeks and mark the peaks. That tells you when to add a server or a line cook and when one fewer will do.

Stagger start times instead of bringing everyone in at once. A second server at 11:45 instead of 11:00 saves 45 minutes of pay on a slow morning and is still on the floor when the rush hits.

The schedule is where labor cost gets decided. In the National Restaurant Association's 2024 operations survey, salaries and wages including benefits were a median 36.5% of sales at full-service restaurants and 31.7% at limited-service ones.

Front of house and back of house roles

Plan each role on its own row. A line cook can't cover a server's section and a host can't run the pass, so a schedule that only counts heads hides the real gaps.

• Front of house: host, server, bartender, busser or runner, cashier at counter-service places.
• Back of house: line cook, prep cook, dishwasher, kitchen lead or sous chef.
• If one person can work two roles, mark it. It makes call-outs much easier to cover.

Mistakes that make restaurant schedules fall apart

• Clopens with too little rest. Closing at midnight and opening at 7 leaves a few hours of sleep, and it shows on the floor.
• The same people on every Friday and Saturday. The rest of the team never learns the busy shifts, and the regulars burn out.
• Forgetting prep and closing time, so shifts end on the schedule while the work is still going.
• Posting the schedule a day or two before the week starts, so people find out too late to plan around it.
• No backup for call-outs. Know who can pick up a shift before you need them.
• Putting someone on a station they are not trained for because the head count looked right.

Scheduling laws that apply to some restaurants

Federal law requires overtime at one and a half times the regular rate after 40 hours in a workweek. It does not require meal or rest breaks, but many states do, and state rules win where they are stricter.

A few places add fair workweek (predictive scheduling) rules. They typically require posting schedules 14 days ahead and paying a premium for late changes. Oregon applies them statewide to retail, hospitality and food service employers with 500 or more employees. New York City covers fast food chains and also restricts clopenings. Chicago covers restaurants with at least 250 employees and 30 locations. Seattle covers food service employers with 500 or more employees, and full-service restaurants only if they have 40 or more locations.

Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles and a few other cities have their own versions. Rules and thresholds change, so check your city or state labor office for the current text.

FAQ

See also

• How to make a work schedule for employees
• Rotating shift patterns for 24/7 teams